I have a doll. I remember her now.

She owns the most beautiful eyes—black as night— I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Her lashes are thick and her lids close whenever I put her to sleep. She’s a princess with laces and ribbons on her white and pink dress. She has a little gold crown on top of her curly ebony hair. I envy her.

She looks at me, not with piety; but with despair. She implores—she wants to live. How can that be, I asked her, you are a doll?

Little did I know, she envies me more.

Everyday, she casts me a look that my innocent heart can’t fathom. What am I supposed to do? I can never be you. I am but a child. I have to grow up. The world is so vast for me not to see. I want to live. Please, let me be.

From then on, I kept her in a place where I can never see her. I was sad at first, I have nothing but her. Still, I have to do it for myself.

Now, she’s a vague reverie from somewhere, sometime. She was somehow erased from my memory. Until last night. I saw her. She lived, in me, in my dreams. She feeds in my deepest thoughts. She is me.

This maybe one of the things I try to forget. I was a doll—little Ms. Perfect, a little princess, encased in her own box, with no one but her reflection to accompany her. I was looking at myself the whole time. There was no doll. The doll is me.